


O Captain

by ProwlingThunder



Series: First Words [3]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/F, F/M, First Words Soulmarks, Gen, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 21:50:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5801533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nora Fortune has to be a Captain, eventually. Fate says so. And she wants it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	O Captain

She grows up sandwiched between her words. There's a real sentence on her back, and two words boldly printed on her chest. To little miss Nora Fortune, they are grace wrapped on her flesh, like a warm blanket.

The two on her chest are easy to read; Yes, Captain. She spends her whole childhood wondering what she'll captain, because clearly it's a thing in her future. Her parents have very clean lines of what's a woman's work and what isn't though, what a woman's place is, so some of her hopes get dashed early on. A woman's place is not on the deck of a ship, even though Nora thinks that sailing could be amazing. She is sure as all hells not allowed to join any sports teams, or even cheerleading. Or band.

There is somewhere she can go, somewhere they can't follow and protest, but her parents enroll her in law school early, in the middle of high school to try to dissuade these silly notions of one day being a captain somewhere, somehow, and the workload is an agonizing, grueling thing, but it does manage rather successfully to keep her distracted from wanting to join the local chapter of eagle scouts.

She takes her studies seriously. If her grades fail her, she'll never be a captain anywhere for anything, and that's just not acceptable. Her soul mate is out there, and they'll never meet if she doesn't.

Her father has a lot of belief women shouldn't be lawyers, either, but he still pays for her schooling. Nora's seen her mother deep in prayer quite often, all the while shooting Nora looks, and she's sure it's got nothing to do with her. Maybe her uncle persuaded her father to send her to law school, instead of letting her dreams fester? She has no idea.

She finishes high school in time, and gets her degree not long after, and then she signs some papers and packs a bag full of clothes and gets on the bus.

She doesn't call them until she graduates and they're getting ready to ship her out on deployment.

"I've joined the army."

Her mother's voice is a-tremble. She can hear her father in the background, asking who's on the line. "What...? But you're a lawyer, Nora-dear. And you're a good lawyer."

"I want to be a soldier. They're letting women enlist, and you heard on the news, if they don't get more volunteers, they're going to enact the draft." And then Nora will have to try to defend or prosecute people trying to get out of it, and why should she do that, when she can join up and keep at least one of them from having to go?

"Nora, that's not a woman's place..."

"What's that girl up to now?" Her father's voice in the background.

"Honey, Nora says she joined the army.."

"What?! Give me that phone. You've done what now, Nora?"

"I've joined the army."

"Don't be foolish, girl. The army's no place for you. Now you come back home at once."

"I can't." She doesn't want to, is the thing. She wants to be a captain. She wants to do her duty.

"If you get on that bus, you are dead to us, do you hear me?"

Nora's chest squeezes the air from her lungs.

She thinks about the bus, seven months ago and some odd weeks. There was a reason she didn't tell them then. Then she draws her attention back to the military cargo plane she's about to climb on. A hysterical laugh tries to bubble in her throat, and she can see one of the loads-men waving for her attention.

She'll make captain and find her soul-mate, the one who's words are between her breasts, and she'll keep him or her safe until she retires and they can be together. She came in with a degree, so she doesn't expect it to be very long.

"Okay."

"Nora! You listen to me--"

She hangs up, and the ensuing silence has her soul vibrating like a tuning fork. A part of her had known this would be the foregone conclusion, of course, but still..

"Sir, are you alright?"

Nora nods and steps to the ramp. She won’t give her father the satisfaction of her tears. 

"Homesickness," which isn't a lie. "Are we ready to go?"

"Wheels up in five. You said you wanted to know, Lieutenant."

"Thank you, Private."

-

She gets demoted almost immediately because her immediate superior has a hate boner for women in uniform. But she won’t be under his command forever, and it's an officer's quality to be able to swallow distaste for another person and still do their job.

Some of the men still defer to her, even without her rank, and that, she thinks, that's what's going to make her a Captain.

-

There's no way around the soldier's shower. She has to bathe, and she can't do that fully dressed. The men respect her, and that's the important part, so she strips and climbs in, and kind of misses the stalls back in training.

Private Hawken whistles from behind her. "Some words you've got there, Fortune."

"What's it say?" She's curious. She's always known they were there, but she can't get a good look in mirrors. She trusts Hawken for a bunch of reasons. They're not Hawken's words; Hawken's already found his soul-mate, and even if he hadn't, he would have matched her first words to him on his skin, he would have known even when she hadn't.

Hawken presses his fingers lightly against her back. "'Well, fuck. Now I’m confused.' That's not bad, as far as phrases go. I've seen people with worse."

The words rattle through her bones and she shudders. She's never heard them before, not from anyone. No one had ever told her what they said. But hearing them now, she can understand why her parents had never told her what it was.

But she's in the army now. One thing they've taught her to do is use the word fuck fourteen times in a fifteen word sentence.

"..thanks, Hawken."

"You didn't know?"

She shook her head. She hadn't. She's glad she does now. She can know who to look for.

She’ll find him. The words on her chest put her on the right track.

-

She’s in the middle of Mess hanging out with Hawken and Von Hout when she hears them. Well, to be more precisely, she’s trying to foster off the gruel on her plate for some of Von Hout’s homemade moonshine that she knows he carries in his flask, but it’s mostly in jest because she doesn’t drink anywhere except the barracks. 

“Well, fuck. Now I’m confused.”

But she hears them from next to their table, and she can’t keep herself from looking; she’s been waiting to hear those words since Hawken traced them on her back. They all look, the group of them, as if someone just announced a live mortar round was placed in the Officer’s lounge.

She doesn’t know him. Rumor was they were flying in a handful of new recruits to replace Squad Leader Bonnay and his team. They’d lost them a few weeks ago in a firefight. She hadn’t really cared for Bonnay-- he had ideas about where a woman’s place was, _too_ , and she has no idea how so many of them managed to make it through Basic training-- but she did miss his team. They’d been good guys.

But he looks so shell-shocked that she can’t help but smile, her lips pulled into a warm smile that’s just a little teasing, a little mock-indignated. “What, haven’t seen a woman in army green before?”

He rocks, as if she’d reached out and struck him, but instead of taking it badly he smiles back at her. “Not one as pretty as you.”

It’s an obvious pick-up line, but it feels a little honest, too. Sincere, in ways pick-up lines usually weren’t. She offers him her hand and he accepts it, and all at once she loves him, because he takes it like she’s a real man and gives it a firm shake, not like she’s some dainty woman who can’t defend herself, like she’s not a soldier. She is, and her soul thrills that he recognizes this.

“Nora Fortune.” She leaves off her rank deliberately, when just around the others. Only Officers would fault her for it, and half of them have no idea why she got demoted. It would be somewhat demeaning to explain it to them. She’ll make Captain if she has to claw her way there out of the Alaskan snowbanks on her own. “What’s your name, soldier?”

“Just Quinn.”

 _Just Quinn_ will do for now.

-

Captain Mitchell has an unfortunate meeting with an enemy bullet carrying his name, and Nora supposes she really, really aught to feel bad about that, except that she can’t, because the only one they lose is Captain Mitchell, and she’s okay with that. He’s only been slightly more tolerable in the last few months because Private Quinn is there, and he’s actually in her squad, so he has reasons to be around her that even the Captain can’t circumvent all the time. 

The Chinese do her a favor by doing it, so she lets one of the terrified youths go when she has the chance to kill him, only clips him in the arm while he retreats back to his own team. Maybe next time he’ll think twice about scouting so far out.

-

Hawkens heads back to base with Mitchell’s body, and they’re several days into the field, so Nora is not the least bit surprised when it takes almost a week to the day for Hawkens to come back. He’s with a tall man of fair skin, dark hair, and eyes like glacial ice.

He’s introduced as the new captain, which has to be wrong, because he can’t be any older than she is.

“Captain?” The dubiousness in her voice makes him smile, the asshole. It’s just a little smile, tiny and barely-there, like he knows some private joke. It pisses her off.

“Yes, Captain.”

Cold chills chase their way down her body, caresses the words down her breast. She tried to swallow down her outrage, that she would hear those words in a vein of mockery, but it turns out not to be required, because there’s Quinn. Quinn, who’s not led her astray yet. He rests a hand on her back and she warms despite the bite of spring.

“Captain King?”

“Private Quinn,” Captain King greets, dipping his head a bit. There’s a fae light in his eyes, thawing glaciers into sea-melt. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Oh. So this is..

_Oh._

-

Maybe it’s not love in the conventional sense. But it’s love to Nora, the best of worst fortunes, and it becomes something amazing and perfect regardless.

They go to war, and they retire and get married, make babies, and life is perfect until it isn’t.

-

 _You can’t have him,_ she thinks, fierce as any hellcat as the freakish woman tries to take her Shaun, the part of her Captain that he gave to her first and Quinn second, _you’ll have to kill me first._

They’d back her up on all fronts if they could, but right now, she’s the only soldier here.


End file.
